I believe the debate between capitalism and socialism is not over. I hope these little essays are informative and funny; I am certain they will occasionally make you feel more human. The first post, "A State of Mind," is the introduction, and the rest are in chronological order, the newest first. Readers are free to browse, but I recommend reading "A Greater Power" early on, as a re-evaluation of capitalism, and "Theories and Suffering," for my perspective on Marxist thought. I welcome comments, questions, and "likes." If you hate this, we can fight about that--oh yes!
In Ukraine, Putin’s army is shelling Kharkov and Kiev. Ukrainian civilians are dying beneath the rubble of their homes as I write. There is reportedly a hit list of pro-democracy Ukrainians.
In the US, QAnon fanatics heckled the President during the State of the Union this evening, as he spoke about his son’s death. Trump and Tucker Carlson defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The January 6 Commission continues to interview witnesses and review evidence.
Canada is recovering from a trucker protest funded by American Trump supporters. It is unusual for protestors in democracies to demand the resignation of the head of state, or to harass and attack citizens near the site of the protest. And I cannot recall protesters attempting to cause a recession in their own country, as the Canadian truckers did by blocking the border crossings between Ontario and the Upper Midwest, hurting manufacturing on both sides of the border.
Their organization was remarkable. QAnon, white supremacists and anti-vaxxers were blended together and funded by rich Trump supporters in the US. The Canadian government seemed frozen in place, stunned perhaps at the opposition to reasonable public health measures, and at the sheer un-Canadian tone of the truckers.
It did not resemble a normal protest so much as an FSB Staff College exercise. Even if the protest wasn’t planned in Moscow, the apparent intent was to de-stabilize the Canadian state.
The conduct of the truckers in Ottawa left a mark:
It may seem as though everything is going wrong at once; the world is suddenly chaotic.
I submit that the chaos is more apparent than real. All these events are tightly linked and flow from the same cause: Billionaire Capitalism, which is entering a much more violent phase.
Putin invaded Ukraine intending to de-stabilize and intimidate Europe, humiliate the Biden administration in the run-up to the mid-term elections, give Trump ammunition against Biden, and perhaps get a nationalistic bump from the Russian public. He may have assumed that four years of Trump had weakened NATO.
But the Ukrainians reacted as Republican moderates and Joe Manchin should have reacted long ago. The Ukrainians are fighting like men and women who know precisely what they value, and precisely what they reject. When I was young, people used to say, “fight like a cornered raccoon,” to describe someone fighting with strength beyond strength. But these raccoons also believe in something. They call it “Europe,” by which they mean democracy, education, a free press and human dignity. Also a class structure without kleptocrats, and a head of state who doesn’t poison people.
They don’t want Putin’s Billionaire State, nor Trump’s either.
The Ukrainian government opened up its armories to the citizens. On TV, I saw a statistician with an AK-47 on the streets of Kiev. Instead of going to work, he went to the armory that morning, picked up his weapon, and found a group of partisans to join. Such a man should be uniquely qualified to calculate the odds against him and his country, but he wasn’t in a calculating frame of mind.
Jung said that “God” is the highest value the psyche can encompass, and are there higher values than human life, human dignity, and the path of the spirit? Are we witnessing a theophany in Ukraine?
Is the Ukrainian resistance a turning point? It certainly is in terms of the world’s understanding of the threat Putin (and Billionaire Capitalism) pose. Russia is not just a semi-normal country with a mediocre human rights record. It is instead a threat to us all.
Nationalism is based on memory. “Je Me Souviens” is the motto of Quebec, and it might as well be the motto of most nationalist movements:
“Je me souviens (French pronunciation: [ʒə mə suvjɛ̃]) is the official motto of Quebec, a province of Canada. The motto, translated literally into English, means: “I remember.” It may be paraphrased as conveying the meaning: “We do not forget, and will never forget, our ancient lineage, traditions, and memories of all the past.”[1]“
The problem with “not forgetting” is that human memory is a slippery thing, and nationalistic memory is particularly unreliable; in the best case it is myth, in the worst paranoid delusion.
Germany was not “stabbed in the back by the Jews and the socialists” in World War I. Instead, its leadership made a series of strategic mistakes, culminating in the disastrous Spring Offensive of 1918.
Nor was the South a victim of foreign aggression in the Civil War; its slaves were not content, and its army did not fight heroically to the end. In late 1864, Jefferson Davis stated that 2/3 of Confederate soldiers were absent from duty, most without permission.
But nationalistic memory is not merely self-serving; it is false in a profound way, in a way that alienates us from our own existence.
Once my family and I went to a castle on the Cape Coast, in Ghana. This castle was used for the slave trade and was a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We took the tour. The horrors of the slave trade should be familiar to any educated person, but a forty-minute tour had the effect of intensifying those horrors to an almost unbearable degree. As we left, we struggled with our feeling that somehow this had to be made right. And yet, how could anyone make the slave trade right?
After a period of silence, my wife said, “their suffering was terrible, but it’s in the past. They aren’t suffering anymore.”
And that’s always true—whatever our ancestors suffered during the religious wars or slavery or the Potato Famine is in the past. Barring any metaphysical surprises, they are at peace.
Or, I should say, that’s almost always true, except in nationalist memory, where past suffering is permanent. In Serbian nationalist imagination, the suffering and treachery of the Battle of Kossovo (1389) never stopped—it’s always with us, like the Resurrection or the Fall.
When I say that the suffering of the slaves at Cape Coast is in the past, that is not to say that the past is unimportant or that the political and social effects of slavery aren’t still with us—they are. And an understanding of the past is important; in this case, the insight that New World slavery was a result of pre-modern capitalism is critical.
But nationalism and identity politics ignore the need for insight and see the present only in terms of past suffering. Identity politics would have us believe that without experiencing past suffering (through empathy, or something like it), we can only see our present suffering “through a glass darkly.” We are vaguely unhappy, dislocated, alienated—but we don’t know quite why. But then we read about the Middle Passage, or the witch trials, or the Potato Famine, and finally we know the source of our unhappiness. This past suffering has been sitting there all along, unnamed and unrecognized, like a Scientology engram.
But is this true? No, it is mostly false, particularly on an individual level. You might well argue that all these historic tragedies have contributed to the pervasive dehumanization of modern life, and that could be the case. But to trace our individual unhappiness back to a specific atrocity that occurred before we were born? The web of past trauma—much of it unrecorded—is too dense. Tracing present unhappiness back to a single event is like tracking a single scorpion across the jungle floor.
And if we could see past traumas clearly, if we could track that scorpion, what we would mostly find are the traumas—or everyday frustrations—of our parents and grandparents. Earlier traumas tend to be diluted by time and healing.
It’s not through feelings that we understand the past, but through thoughtful study.
If an individual suffers intensely, from a serious illness, or hunger, or grief, and if they come to believe their suffering is permanent, then we easily recognize that as an illusion. No individual suffering is ever permanent.
But somehow, we believe that group suffering—historical suffering—is permanent; it is not.
We need to understand the past, but we don’t need to envision it or empathize with the dead. Our empathy and our visions should be directed toward the future.
In nationalism, the vision of the future often involves a final war in which the nation’s enemies are destroyed or overthrown. Identity politics, which is Nationalism Lite, has hardly any vision at all. Where is the vision of healing and reconciliation that we might have expected from feminism, just to take one example?
“Where there is no vision the people perish,” as it says in Proverbs. And where is vision lacking exactly? Wherever people cling too tightly to the past, to their prejudices, their unexamined beliefs, and their obsessions.
We cannot build a better future without a vision, and we cannot create a vision without summoning up all our imaginative energy, our finest hopes and ideals. As we do so, we will be truly alive.
But if our spirit is tangled up in the nets of the past, if we cannot let the past go, then the people will indeed perish.
The insurrection of January 6 was so chaotic and nihilistic that it may seem unplanned, but that is doubtful. For example, whoever planted the pipe bombs intended to create a diversion, and that’s part of a plan. It’s also likely someone with military training came up with that idea.
So, what was the overall plan?
In general terms, the plan was to decertify the Electoral College vote, or to delay certification indefinitely.
There are some specific parts of the plan that are clear from news reports. For example, that Pence was supposed to unilaterally reject the electoral votes from the states, and that Trump was going to seize the Dominion voting machines and appoint a commission to investigate electoral fraud, headed by Sidney Powell.
The last link alludes to another apparent part of the plan: the declaration of martial law, or some other state of emergency. And that plays off the QAnon idea of “The Storm,” when martial law is declared and Trump’s enemies are executed.
Given these three elements—-Pence’s rejection of the electoral votes from the states, the seizure of the voting machines and the declaration of a state of emergency—what might the overall plan have looked like? Granted, this is speculative, but there can’t be any doubt about the objective, which was to decertify the election or delay the certification vote indefinitely.
The plan was almost certainly not: “let’s get our supporters to storm the Capitol, scare Congress and then maybe they’ll be so intimidated they won’t certify the election.” Besides being feckless and unrealistic, that plan wouldn’t require seizing the voting machines or a declaration of martial law.
What we saw on TV was a broken plan; it failed, and in the aftermath Trump’s supporters wandered around the Capitol imagining they’d won a great victory.
Let’s look at what I believe was the original plan, and then look at the modified plan that was put into execution.
The original: Trump speaks to the crowd and it marches to the Capitol. Inside, Congress is in session, presided over by Mike Pence, and the electoral votes from the states are brought to Pence’s podium. Pence looks briefly at the votes and says he cannot accept them, due to fraud. He cites “new” information, perhaps related to the seizure of voting machines—“examination shows conclusive evidence of hacking,” or something like that. Naturally, there’s a scene. At that moment, the Proud Boys, QAnon cultists and various militias storm the Capitol.
This is “The Storm” of QAnon mythology, when Trump’s opponents are executed, and QAnon zealots were quoted to that effect. Congressional leaders were to be arrested and executed—perhaps after some sort of trial.
Trump goes on TV, blames antifa or BLM infiltrators for the killings, invokes the Insurrection Act and declares martial law. For this to be at all plausible, the victims would have to include some Republicans. Since Trump hates Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney more than he hates most Democrats, that part of the plan works for him.
Trump also appoints a commission to investigate electoral fraud, headed by Sidney Powell or Giuliani, seizes all the voting machines and suspends habeas corpus. China is blamed for masterminding everything. A number of people are taken into immediate custody, including the Secretary of State of Georgia. The inauguration is postponed until the commission has completed its work. Congress is suspended for its own safety.
Demonstrations are declared illegal, and any that occur are treated as insurrections, and suppressed by gunfire. Regular army units would do the dirty work, and Flynn might be appointed head of the Joint Chiefs.
Eventually Powell issues a report saying there was massive fraud and overwhelming evidence that Trump won the election. The courts are silenced somehow, and the media suppressed. Trump gets a second term, and enough Republicans are allowed to return to Congress to approve of that.
The modified plan: Pence had refused his part in this play, but the rest of it was intended to go forward without him—or rather, he was added to the list of people to be executed.
This modified plan didn’t work because the Capitol Police fought too hard and no member of Congress was captured and executed. Without executions there was no way to justify the Insurrection Act, suspend habeas corpus and all the rest. Congress was hopping mad and returned later that night to certify the election, although many Republicans still voted against it.
Of course there’s a lot of supposition here, but this argument is anchored in three places: Trump incited the storming of the Capitol; Trump wanted Pence to reject the Electoral College ballots; Trump’s goal was a second term, if not dictatorship for life.
He couldn’t achieve his goal if Congress were still in session and the courts were operating normally. Therefore he had to declare a state of emergency—martial law or an invocation of the Insurrection Act—so he could dismiss Congress and overrule the courts.
Would this plan have worked? Probably not—I don’t see the Army allowing itself to be used in that way, and the media and courts might not have been neutralized so easily. But it *might* have worked for a few weeks or months.
And more to the point, Trump and Flynn and Powell probably believed it would work.
Would they really have killed members of Congress? Would they really have gone that far? Their objective was to overturn a free and fair election and impose a dictatorship; there’s no way to do that without force. They were certainly aware of the significance of the “The Storm,” to their QAnon followers.
If they didn’t realize they were going to have to kill to destroy American democracy, then they’re even bigger fools than we thought. And in fact Trump and Flynn seemed comfortable with shedding American blood.
Let’s now look at the implications. First, if the modified plan had worked, there would have been significant resistance: mass demonstrations, strikes and so on. After all, the majority of the American people, the judiciary, the media, and most of the political class knew the election was free and fair. Dealing with this resistance would have necessarily involved lethal force, since both the courts and the people would have opposed Trump. The country would have been plunged into civil strife, perhaps full-scale civil war, willy-nilly. It’s impossible to predict how bad the violence would have been, except to note that 45%-50% of Americans have consistently said they were strongly opposed to Trump as President—imagine how they’d react if he were promoted to dictator.
Second, let’s look at what this means for Billionaire Capitalism and American democracy. There is a persistent tendency for the Republican Party to move right on issues, regardless of public opinion or the facts. Originally, back in the ‘80s, Republicans claimed that there wasn’t enough evidence of global warming; then they admitted to the warming, but contended it was just normal cycling of the earth’s climate; then they claimed it was a hoax by scientists, then a plot by liberals to take control of the economy and society.
At present they just spit on the ground whenever the subject comes up. Most of them know that climate change is real, but they have no other cards to play. So they just ramp up the hate against Democrats and ignore the issue.
And this phenomenon isn’t limited to climate change. On tax policy, for example, they started out in the ‘80s arguing that the 70% maximum rate was too high, and a tax cut—a single one— would help the middle class and stimulate the economy; they actually had reasons.
Now the big tax cuts are never-ending and targeted at only a tiny proportion of the population, and the Republicans can hardly be bothered to come up with reasons. It’s transparent that the Republican donor class is using the federal budget as an ATM.
In effect, the Republican position is that the ultra-rich should pay only token taxes, or none at all. And that any opposition to that idea is Marxism. This is not at all where they started out in 1981.
And gun control is similar. It seems centuries ago that George H.W. Bush banned the import of assault weapons.
And democratic rule is another such issue. An awakened democracy has always been the biggest threat to Billionaire Capitalism, and the Republicans have been undermining democracy with gerrymandering, voter suppression and massive disinformation for a long, long time. But at the end of the day, it all looked somewhat constitutional, and stealing an election that wasn’t close was considered bad form.
Storming Congress to prevent counting the electoral vote was quite a break with tradition, to say the least. And summary executions of members of Congress and the Vice-President would likewise have been unprecedented. Once again Republicans have moved much further right, this time on the issues of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
In fact, they are now openly totalitarian, with no commitment to the democratic process or the rule of law, bristling with rage against America. Their movement is addicted to disinformation, especially conspiracy theories, and its great issue is that the 2020 election was stolen from them. This is a lie, of course, but the truth—any truth—would be wildly out of place.
Can they pivot away from this issue? It’s hard to imagine how; if their hard-core followers truly believe the election was stolen, how can any other issue take center stage? It is possible that many of them realize that Biden won the election fair and square, just as many of them now realize that climate change is real. But that doesn’t mean they’ll let go of the issue, because they are now too alienated and radicalized to admit they were wrong.
Before Jan. 6, there was always a distinction between right-wing domestic terrorists and Republican leadership, but now we have members of Congress attempting to bring firearms onto the House floor, and of course there is Josh Hawley’s fist, raised in solidarity with white supremacists and QAnon cultists on their way to pillage the Capitol.
But as Ed Rollins recently pointed out, “if the GOP becomes the party of chaos, we’re finished.” Can they sell suburban voters t-shirts with the QAnon Shaman’s face on them? Are white middle-class women impressed? Conservative-leaning blacks? Older white voters in swing states? Are old people into QAnon?
Most of the electorate reject more tax cuts or deregulation, and ditto for slashing Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare. Trump’s trade wars were never popular, so what else do Republicans have to offer voters?
What they have is this: that modern American culture itself is the enemy, and no counter-measures taken against it are too extreme. Our modern culture as it exists today—with its recycling bins, its tolerance for gays, respect for science and horror at police violence—is the serpent which the right-wing must smite.
They are trying to sell the idea that America is at war with itself—perhaps only a cultural war for now, but soon enough a shooting war as well—and that conservative whites should sign up enthusiastically for this struggle. The Democratic Party is the political expression of modern American culture, and its triumph would be so intensely oppressive that actively preventing tens of millions of Democrats from voting is justified, besides—in effect—installing Trump as dictator-for-life.
How in the world does that appeal to any group beyond die-hard Trump supporters? How is that any sort of positive vision for the future? Even many Trump supporters might quail at the breadth of this struggle—they know that modern American culture is what it is, that this is what most young people have already chosen, and it’s not going away. Trump supporters generally understand that they’ve lost the culture war—oh, they can blame it on the media and the universities, but they know the situation.
Trying to defeat “peace, love and understanding” with QAnon and white supremacy is not going to work.
And a particular problem for Republicans is violence. QAnon and the white supremacists have a vision that their version of justice can only be achieved by deadly force. And they don’t see this as a disagreeable necessity because they believe bloodshed will purify our corrupt society. And these groups are key, because they are the only Trump supporters who have deeply held reasons for hating modern American culture.
If they start a campaign of assassinations and bombings then what will Kevin McCarthy say? That the GOP needs to stay on message? That Biden’s proposals are communism?
No, if the Republicans resort to domestic terrorism then the country will turn decisively against them.
But if they don’t resort to violence then that undermines the credibility of their message of the monstrous threat of modern American culture and the Democratic Party. If it’s all that bad you’re going to do something about it, right? Oh, you’re just going to sit there, watch OAN and refuse to get vaccinated? I see.
If this is the end of civilization and Republicans are mumbling about voting machines and transexuals, then that looks rather weak, doesn’t it?
Worse, it looks suspiciously like a failed political movement. The Billionaire Capitalist apparatchiks can’t expand their coalition without better issues, so all they can do is try to flog more outrage and violence out of white conservatives who didn’t go to college, but there’s a limit to everything.
The insurrectionists of January 6 have been extremely quiet lately. Whatever they’re thinking, I’m going to guess it’s not good for the Republican apparatchiks; the QAnon cultists and white supremacists were promised that Trump was going to be president by now. They were also promised pardons.
Part of Trump’s appeal to his base was his unvarnished will-to-power; he talked tough and acted large. But after all the trash he talked during the campaign, Biden is unquestionably in the White House.
Eventually, that’s going to sink in for Trump’s base. They may still stick with him, and the “stolen election” issue may have some legs left, but the idea that future elections will just be a replay of 2020 assumes that Trump’s base is unvarying, and it isn’t.
What it is instead are older white people mostly without a lot of education and often (not always) without much money, spare time or energy. These people need to get to bed early and take their meds on time. If they have jobs, they need them.
And they’ve experienced their share of disappointment; they know what that’s like. The 2022 midterms might be a replay of 2020, but I wonder—I just wonder.
Ross Douthat examines the future of the pro-life movement in the linked article. He grapples with the value of human life in modern American politics, a question a socialist, or indeed anyone of good will, should take seriously.
But Douthat can only approach that issue through the narrow strait of his pro-life Catholicism. Again and again, he asks, why hasn’t the pro-life movement succeeded? Clearly, he is deeply troubled by this issue.
However, he sees the pro-life movement right now as being on the verge of a great victory, with a Supreme Court that should theoretically overturn Roe v. Wade—but Douthat seems uncertain whether this will really happen or not. He writes:
But abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant. First, there is the strong possibility that the 6-to-3 conservative court does not have a majority of justices who particularly want to apply their principles to something as fraught as abortion, as opposed to the comforting blandness of administrative law. Between the popularity of Roe in polling and the fear of liberal backlash and potential court-packing, some combination of John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh may decide to follow the rule of institutional self-protection rather than their principles, or find ways to make only the smallest-possible edits to the court’s existing abortion jurisprudence.
I agree. They won’t overturn Roe v. Wade, unless the goal of making life worse for the poor (see Class and Underclass) is worth the political risks, or if they miscalculate those same risks. But they won’t overturn it because of their “principles.” They may have principles on certain issues, but not abortion. Barrett might be an exception, but for most of them, being anti-abortion is just a bullet point on their resumes.
The conservatives on the Supreme Court, especially the younger ones, are pure careerists, appartchiks of a political movement that has been a major force in our country as long as they can remember.
And they probably know that Roe v. Wade can’t be overturned without tearing the country apart and delegitimizing the Supreme Court.
And as Douthat recognizes, this uncertainty extends to all elected Republicans as well:
For a long time the core pro-life position — not that abortion should be a little more regulated or a little more culturally disfavored, but that it should be truly forbidden in almost every case — has been a symbol and an abstraction: an idea that Republican presidents can very notionally support, a cause that judicial appointees can benefit from without directly endorsing, an ideal that Republican state legislators can invoke without having to compromise their libertarian principles to make it real.
But now, with the pro-life movement hovering in a strange limbo between a longed-for victory and another judicial defeat, the question looms up: Is anti-abortion sentiment notional or real?
We can only answer that question by asking, what is the political function of the pro-life movement? It certainly isn’t to outlaw abortion, or that would already have happened, given the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and the Executive Branch since 1973.
From the point of view of Billionaire Capitalism, the political function of the pro-life movement is to get anti-abortion Catholics to vote for tax cuts for the rich. The anti-abortion activists are no doubt sincere, but they don’t get to choose the overall political context in which they operate. Once you’ve decided that the Democrats are evil because they support Roe v. Wade, then the billionaires own you. This is one thing Douthat doesn’t get….although he may be close to a breakthrough on that issue.
If you doubt that the political function of the pro-life movement is to deliver tax cuts for billionaires, then let’s consider Douthat’s assertion that the “core pro-life position” is an absolute ban on abortion. This is fair enough as a statement of what the activists want. But is that anything like what they would actually get, even if Roe v. Wade were overturned completely? Five minutes of thought on that subject is enough to establish that no, if the issue were turned back to the states, the most populous would allow abortions with little or no limitations. Most Americans would notice no difference at all in abortion policy.
And that the few states that might ban abortions wouldn’t have the jurisdiction to prosecute women who traveled out-of-state to terminate their pregnancies. So we’re really talking about prohibiting abortions for poor women in a few deep-red states; overturning Roe v Wade might reduce the number of abortions in this country by 5% to 10%. And no one would thank them even for that, because (a) legislatures in red states would be paralyzed by this issue for years to come, and (b) the poor in those states would only become poorer.
Overturning Roe v Wade was always a shiny object—it was never a proposal that would end abortion. And who is dangling this shiny object before pro-life voters?
One of Roe v Wade’s advantages is that it was a national solution; of course that can also be seen as a disadvantage. But it was after all a solution. And since there’s no federal aspect to the abortion issue, there’s likewise no clear advantage to sending the issue back to the states; ovaries are the same in Massachusetts as they are in Mississippi.
Hence the 14th Amendment remedy being currently discussed:
….. in the last two weeks part of the anti-abortion movement has fallen into an acrimonious debate over a radical proposal — from the Australian philosopher and Notre Dame professor John Finnis, in the journal First Things, arguing that unborn human beings deserve protections under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The political implication of Finnis’s argument is that the pro-life movement’s longtime legal goal, overturning Roe and letting states legislate against abortion, is woefully insufficient, and in fact pro-life activists should be demanding that the Supreme Court declare a fetal right to life.
After 48 years, Finnis and his supporters are belatedly realizing that overturning Roe v. Wade was always pointless, given their objective of completely eliminating abortion? Their goal always required a sweeping national solution, not fifty interminable battles at the state level—because if state legislatures can outlaw abortion, then legalizing it again is only an election away, and vice-versa.
But of course the 14th Amendment remedy is just a fever dream, only a shade or two more plausible than the QAnon mythology. The current courts would never agree to it.
But it has one sterling virtue: it will keep the pro-life movement together and still voting for billionaire tax cuts. Once the grass-roots supporters understand that overturning Roe v Wade didn’t work, they might be ready for the next windmill.
Douthat sees the overthrow of Roe v. Wade as an opportunity, however. His vision is that the pro-life movement can agitate for a social safety net for poor women who would otherwise have aborted their fetuses, or perhaps for all poor mothers:
The pro-choice side insists that these women’s independence and well-being and equality depends on a right to end a life that, were it wanted, would be called by name and celebrated with ultrasound photos on the fridge. Against that argument the anti-abortion movement needs more than just the ultrasound photo: It needs to prove the pro-choice premise wrong.
The movement’s wiser leaders know this. Last year, for instance, The Atlantic’s Emma Green profiled Cheryl Bachelder, the former chief executive of Popeye’s and a rare pro-lifer in the C-suite world, who was working with other anti-abortion leaders “to brainstorm all the community support systems that would need to be stronger in a world where abortion is illegal: mental health services, addiction-recovery programs, affordable child care.” Green also reported that the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, has been compiling a database of state resources for pregnant women in preparation for the hoped-for end of Roe.
But, of course — as Green noted with dry understatement — actually getting a major expansion of social services in states that might conceivably ban abortion would require a different Republican Party than the one that exists today.
And further on:
And a victory at the court should likewise widen the pro-life imagination well beyond Republican politics-as-usual, toward an all-options-on-the-table vision of how public policy could make an abortion ban feasible, popular, enduring.
In either scenario, there is something to be said for a pro-life movement that talks less in the language of partisanship and proceduralism and sounds more like the utopian and not simply conservative cause that its logic ultimately requires it to be.
In this sense, saying “yes, the Constitution that protects ‘persons’ should protect the hidden and helpless person in the womb,” and “yes, we will pay whatever price in spending and social support that this principle requires” are not contradictory positions: They are the same argument on different fronts.
Douthat is saying that he’s willing and even eager to adopt socialist family policies in order to make a ban on abortions work. (After some thought, I decided not to put quotation marks around “work” in the previous sentence.) If he thinks those policies such great ideas, let’s adopt them first, and see how that affects the abortion rate and the well-being of newborns and their mothers. And that’s not just an argumentative point: if he concedes—as he has, implicitly—that economic motives often play a large role in the decision to terminate a pregnancy, then perhaps the abortion rate is just the tip of the iceberg? Maybe we need to step back and take a long look at the overall economic pressures on young families, including the ones who aren’t poor and who aren’t considering abortion.
Perhaps the decline in the rates of marriage and of births, as well as abortions are all strongly influenced by the demands of modern capitalism?
Be that as it may, the idea that the pro-life movement might go rogue in an effort to ensure that unwanted babies at least have child care and proper nutrition is another fever dream. Billionaire Capitalism will never permit that. Douthat talks about the pro-life movement re-assessing its “alliances” with the Federalist Society and the GOP. But the pro-life movement is much more a colony than an ally of the Republican Party.
And given that the GOP has become a distinctly unsafe space for people who merely believe in free elections, an expansion of the social safety net via family policy is totally out of the question. But we can admire Ross Douthat’s relative independence of mind. He’s the first conservative writer I know of who has admitted that outlawing abortion would mean significant hardship for poor women. He’s also the first to implicitly admit that economic pressures often loom large in the decision to terminate a pregnancy.
But like many moderate and reasonable Republicans, he projects his own decency onto the movement he belongs to. Unfortunately, the anti-abortion movement was never as high-minded as Douthat appears to be, and it was never an independent phenomenon. It was always part of the religious wedge issues from the ‘70s and ‘80s: opposition to gay rights, gay marriage and women’s rights—particularly their position in the family and the church. There is a pretty tight correlation even today between people who oppose the ordination of women as priests or ministers and those who oppose abortion. And likewise for gay marriage and gay anything.
And the pro-life movement was linked to the Christian Identity Church, the Army of God, and other white supremacist groups. And of course it has a history of murderous violence, we might say terrorism.
The Army of God and Eric Rudolph probably best exemplify the linkages between white supremacy, homophobia, the anti-abortion movement and violence.
To take Ross Douthat seriously on the morality of abortion is one thing. To take the next step and accept his implicit claim that the anti-abortion movement is founded on that concern is something quite different. The anti-abortion movement is in truth part of a multi-faceted reaction to the Sexual Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, with “reaction” being the operative word. If they truly cared about abortion, they’d be pursuing measures short of outlawing it, which is unlikely to ever happen. For example, they could support mandatory sexual education and widespread availability of birth control—but they oppose both.
Douthat writes:
…. a lot of the country just seems not to want to think too much about abortion and to punish the party that forces it to do so.
Douthat is wrong to sneer at the moral judgement of the American people. They take abortion seriously as an issue, but they do not trust the violent fanatics that control the anti-abortion movement, and they will punish a political party that enables them.
But let’s turn away from Douthat’s illusions and the violent history of the anti-abortion movement. Let’s instead look in the mirror.
Haven’t I written that my vision of socialism is founded upon the sacredness of human life? Doesn’t that include the life of fetuses? Shouldn’t socialism oppose abortion?
What I wrote in What Our Mind Cannot Grasp:
“When we say human life is sacred, we cannot sentimentalize the conditions of life. Death is an inevitable part of life. The belief that life is sacred cannot imply a denial or evasion of death.”
With regard to abortion, what “conditions of life” are relevant? There is a brutal math involved in human reproduction: many people will have sex thousands of times their life, but we can’t sustain a birth rate much above replacement, 2.33 children per family, without increases in productivity or available resources. There is a Malthusian mismatch between human sexuality and a birth rate we can afford.
This implies that all societies attempt somehow to limit the number of mouths to feed. Ancient societies openly practiced infanticide: weak children in particular were likely to be abandoned, and in Sparta this appears to have been the law. These societies usually had a deep understanding of the medicinal properties of plants, so abortifacients were well-known. They may also have had birth control methods unknown to us.
Christian societies were not so different, even after the Industrial Revolution. Large numbers of children died from sheer neglect and starvation in orphanages, even in the twentieth century. This was a sort of slow-motion infanticide:
And of course hundreds of thousands, even millions died from working in textile mills, mines, and warships. Although this wasn’t precisely infanticide, there was a pervasive attitude that children were highly expendable, even in advanced Western countries well into the twentieth century.
Of course their parents tried to protect them and nurse them when they fell ill, but poor parents could do little—and most people were poor.
Today, we have more effective methods of birth control, but not effective enough to prevent all unwanted pregnancies—particularly among people who refuse to use birth control for religious reasons.
I personally would love to see far fewer abortions in our country, but I have to be realistic about the conditions of life. Abortions or something similar are common to most societies. If we provided everyone with easily accessible and free birth control, then yes, we would see fewer abortions. But outlawing abortion, in effect compelling people to have more children than they can handle? That seems barbaric. And in today’s context, in America, we are always talking about outlawing abortions only for poor people—and everyone knows that. The other classes will find ways to get abortions.
I want to see many more young people have children, provided they want them—and most of them do. Our birthrate is too low, and our playgrounds are too quiet. Our economic system shouldn’t prevent people from having families, but it does, and the churches have nothing to say on that issue.
Our economic system is causing a low birthrate. How is this low birthrate accomplished, specifically? Contraception is the primary means, but abortion is inevitably part of the picture.
How many abortions per year are caused by the economic system, by the pressures and lack of opportunity young people face?
But Douthat is right to be concerned about how American society values life, or doesn’t. But even if abortions stopped by magic, children would still be huffing paint and eating high-fructose corn syrup. They would be breathing polluted air and drinking polluted water. They would often lack health care and if Billionaire Capitalism had its way, tens of millions more would lose SCHIP and Medicaid.
And when these children reach adulthood—if they do—will the minimum wage still be $7.25 per hour?
But for Douthat, it’s a case of “just this one thing,” the issue of abortion. If only abortions would stop, he would feel hope for the world again. A lot of people are like that, on a variety of issues. The #metoo movement longs for an end to rape in the workplace and sexual harassment; BLM longs for an end to police violence against blacks; people weep and pray for an end to mass shootings, and they think that the world would be made new if their prayers were granted. Trans people believe if they were accepted then the future could finally begin. The ADL can only dream of a future without antisemitism, but dream they do. The battle against climate change seems like a struggle against a collective death wish. If only climate change could be stopped: “just this one thing!”
But what if we live in a society marked by pervasive dehumanization? And what if all these individual issues are just manifestations of this dehumanization? What if they are all connected?
And what if we could understand the source of this dehumanization, and we discovered that it was capitalist socialization—a set of habits and attitudes that are economically useful but, if carried too far, profoundly destructive?
What if, right at the center of our civilization, there was an emotional and spiritual dead spot?
A striking feature of American politics is the long-standing ineffectiveness of the Left. If we ask ourselves how the American Left differs from a successful left-wing party like the SPD (as discussed in At the Kroll Opera House), one obvious difference is the American Left’s unwillingness to form a coalition with Centrist forces. For example, the debate over universal healthcare never “gets to yes,” largely because the Left insists on “single-payer” healthcare as the only path to universal coverage. This leads them into absurd situations; for example, I used to get mailers from Bernie Sanders touting “Medicare for All – Single Payer” as an alternative to Obamacare. First of all, Medicare is an excellent program, but it is not single-payer; there are co-pays, and you have to pay for Medigap insurance. Second, the majority of people who got coverage under Obamacare got it through the Medicaid expansion, and Medicaid is practically single-payer.
So, Medicare is not single-payer and Obamacare is largely single-payer, but Bernie said it’s the other way around, so end of discussion.
Will Bernie Sanders support Biden’s efforts to add a subsidized public option to Obamacare? Sanders can be reasonable at times, so we’ll see. It might finally dawn on him that there are many roads to universal coverage.
How did we end up with a situation where the Left refuses on principle any coalition with the Center? This is diametrically opposed to what the SPD did, where the key to their parliamentary success was communication with and influence over centrist parties on many issues. This isn’t a rhetorical question; it is instead key to understanding our historical situation. And I can answer this question, but first I must tell you a story about Texas, in the old days.
In 1972 I voted in a campus election, and one proposal was to fund the “Texas Public Interest Research Group,” or TexPIRG, designed to do consumer and environmental research within Texas to inform both the public and the state government. I pictured them doing research—for example—on safety issues in drilling for oil. I voted for the proposal ($1 per semester per student, tacked onto our tuition bills), and so did most of my peers.
In 1972, most students at that university lived on $200 per month or less, and many lived on less that $150. Minimum wage was $1.60 per hour, and many university employees made $6000 or less.
There were about 35,000 students paying $2 per year, and a $70,000 research budget was substantial. The Student Union provided TexPIRG a free office, and they could have hired a full-time office manager for probably $5000 a year, and ten full-time researchers for $6000 each, with $5000 left over for office equipment and other expenses. (Of course some of the researchers could have been part-time). They probably could have used the university’s copy center for reports.
I regularly visited their office because I wanted one of those research jobs. The visits were always the same: there was a piece of notebook paper with “TexPIRG,” handwritten on it, taped on the inside of a small window in the door. The office itself was absolutely bare. There were no desks, no chairs, no people. The door was locked.
The fee stayed on my tuition bill for several semesters thereafter. The student union reclaimed the office after the first semester or two of inactivity—but not before the notebook paper turned slightly yellow and curled a bit; no one had ever turned on the AC in the office.
I lived a long time in Texas after 1972, and was active politically, and I never saw the slightest trace of TexPIRG. If they did any research, which I doubt, it never influenced Texas policy debates. If you search online, there’s supposedly still a TexPIRG organization, and maybe they do useful work; we live in hope.
The PIRG movement was a brainchild of Ralph Nader, who exemplifies Leftist intransigence and hostility toward the Center. In 2000 he compared Bush and Gore to “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” This might sound like the usual thing a third-party candidate might say—-George Wallace used to say that there “wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties—but let’s drill a bit deeper here: was it true?
If Al Gore had taken office in 2001, what would the Earth’s climate be like today? Would we have invaded Iraq? Who would sit on the Supreme Court? Other examples might be added, but clearly when Nader said there was no difference between Bush and Gore, he was wildly incorrect.
The 2000 election was immensely influential in right-wing thinking, because it demonstrated that a Republican presidential candidate could take office and rule with almost absolute power without winning the popular vote, passing one tax cut after another with no effective opposition. This seemed like a miracle of grace to many adherents of Billionaire Capitalism—-their greatest fear being an awakened democracy. If, as Cheney said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” then Bush proved that democracy doesn’t matter, either.
Although there were other factors in Bush’s victory, the most important was Nader’s candidacy.
During the campaign, Nader launched harsh attacks against Gore, most notably misrepresenting Gore’s environmental record, and he did not conceal his preference for Bush:
Nader often openly expressed his hope for Bush’s victory over Gore, saying it “would mobilize us”,[52] and that environmental and consumer regulatory agencies would fare better under Bush than Gore.[53] When asked which of the two he’d vote for if forced, Nader answered “Bush … If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.”[54] As to whether he would feel regret if he caused Gore’s defeat, Nader replied “I would not—not at all. I’d rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House.”[55] On another occasion, Nader answered this question with: “No, not at all … There may be a cold shower for four years that would help the Democratic Party … It doesn’t matter who is in the White House.”[53]
Nader is not only an excellent example of Leftist hostility to the Center, he practically invented the attitude, and this raises a couple of important questions:
How did Nader become the leader of the Left, and why did he take such an oppositional stance against the Democrats, a Left-Center party which had implemented so many of his ideas in the Sixties and Seventies?
The first question may be puzzling to my younger readers—wasn’t Nader always an important figure on the Left? And the answer is no, Nader was never a Leftist, and by that I mean he never demonstrated against the Vietnam War, never marched against segregation with Dr King or even worked much with the early environmental movement, despite mutual concerns.
Nader’s thing in the ‘60s was consumer safety, and he did not want to branch out; he did not want to get wild; he did not want to get funky. The Sixties and Seventies passed him by, and he was glad to see them go. He was not part of that scene at all.
Nader became a Leftish presence through his tireless speaking tours during the Reagan administration, when the Left was at low ebb. He went to college campuses, talked about the evils of corporate power and the absolute necessity of a third party (led by himself) and collected a check for each and every speech. Eventually he not only became a leader, he re-shaped the American Left.
This was a catastrophe not just for the Left, but for America. Because Nader never had a full-fledged political philosophy; he noticed that corporate influence tended to corrupt government and his remedies for that were standard liberal measures: legislation backed up by new government agencies. But Nader himself was not a liberal—he was never a Democrat and as a young man he was a libertarian.
Worse, he never analyzed capitalism itself. He was concerned with a broad range of issues, mostly related to public health and safety, and he never saw that the common thread in all these issues was capitalism. He might have said the underlying cause was “corporate greed” or “corporate corruption,” but beyond these catchphrases there was no analysis; he never connected the dots.
In 1981 the long struggle against Billionaire Capitalism began, but there was no intellectual framework for the Left to understand what was happening. Marxism had never emphasized the mutability of capitalism, and it had failed to capture the moment during the Sixties and early Seventies. Marxist dogma could not describe any form of oppression that wasn’t economic, so the entire cultural struggle against Cold War socialization—materialism, the denial of nature, the loss of the life of the spirit, sexual repression—-was simply invisible to Marxist eyes. Imagine a revolutionary ideology that was completely unable to sense a critical revolutionary moment: that was Marxism in the ‘60s.
Marxism did however have a critique of capitalism, which was a start. But it had become Soviet dogma, and wasn’t fit for use in an American environment. But Marxism did demonstrate that Left movements need an analysis of capitalism, a vital point.
But in 1981 there was no one to make that point, no one to develop that analysis. Granted, there is an implicit critique of capitalism in American liberalism, but this critique was seldom made explicit. Liberals of that era didn’t want to mention capitalism as a system, for fear of sounding like Marxists, and so they were rolled over by Billionaire Capitalism.
The ‘80s were a dark time for American Leftists. The country made a hard right, with destructive consequences for unions, the environment, civil rights enforcement, and government accountability. The Left naturally felt it had the answers to Reagan’s mistakes and excesses…..but no one was listening. There was no Left media, no leaders of any stature, and not even a common ideology.
Enter Ralph Nader. He had been a national figure for a long time, and was widely respected for his product safety work. Every time you put on a seat belt, you might have been reminded of him. He was a rare public figure who changed everyday life for the better.
And he wasn’t a Marxist, or even a liberal. Even Leftists saw that as an advantage. And it was possible to regard his lack of ideology as pragmatism.
And Nader was a good organizer, and he kept showing up.
That explains how he became a leader of the Left; the next question is, how or why did he develop such an oppositional attitude toward the Democrats, the Center-Left party in America?
Of course I will not stoop to psychoanalysis here, but I do believe that his lack of ideology played a role. In the end, what was the fundamental difference between Nader and Mondale, or Jesse Jackson or Michael Dukakis? If you strip away Nader’s aura of specialness, there wasn’t much to choose from in terms of ideology—they were all liberals. There might be differences of emphasis, but no one was suggesting changes in capitalism itself.
In fact, when Mondale said that one of Japan’s competitive advantages over America was that Japanese CEOs were more innovative, he went further than Nader, because Mondale was questioning whether the ultra-rich were earning their privileges, a veiled attack on the class system itself.
Nader had to differentiate himself, in other words; he obviously couldn’t let Fritz Mondale outflank him on the left. So Nader used what was at hand: his reputation for frugality and incorruptibility. He positioned himself as morally superior to mere liberals, especially those who had held public office.
There was of course no nuance in this position, and it didn’t take long for this branding exercise to degenerate into a Manichaean battle between Good and Evil.
What Nader needed was a way of differentiating himself on the issues, or ideologically, with a clear critique of capitalism, for example. But instead he used an assertion of moral superiority in place of something substantive. He used image instead of content.
Having achieved a position of leadership on the Left, and likewise having differentiated himself from leading Democratic figures, how did Nader use his power and influence?
First, there’s a long and unedifying history of Nader maximizing cash flow in his organizations; Nader worked on that a lot. I won’t go into detail, because charging $20 per head to attend his campaign rallies speaks for itself.
Second, Nader ran for president often. He was first mentioned as a possible candidate in 1972, but he didn’t actually run until a generation later, in 1996.
In 1992, of course, Ross Perot got 19% of the vote. Many Republicans believed that Perot threw the election to Bill Clinton, and although that’s debatable—-when Perot temporarily withdrew, the majority of his supporters switched to Clinton. But Perot’s candidacy did influence the Electoral vote; Clinton carried a number of states that Bush would have otherwise been expected to win.
Did Perot’s performance in 1992 influence Nader to run in 1996? Did Nader see himself throwing an election to the Republicans, as Perot was perceived as doing in 1992?
In the 2000 election, Nader clearly intended for Bush to win, as evidenced by his own statements; the excuses made for Nader are just different flavors of denial. Nader didn’t expect to win, and he was on record as favoring Bush over Gore—it’s as simple as that. Nader was acting as an auxiliary to the Republicans—that is, to Billionaire Capitalism.
But if you somehow believe that what happened in 2000 was an aberration, a case of a good man making a bad decision, then look at what happened in 2004. The 2000 election had been a catastrophe for the Greens, and they wanted no more to do with Nader. So in 2004 Nader was faced with the necessity of petitioning to get on the ballot in most states. The Democrats responded by challenging many of his petitions, either in court or administratively. And in several cases the Democrats prevailed. In Pennsylvania, for example, the courts found that 62% of the signatures on Nader’s petitions were invalid—they were “rife with forgeries,” as the judges put it. Really.
How did Nader respond to this? He appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case. He didn’t fire anyone in his campaign, he didn’t launch an investigation or apologize—nothing.
Let’s quickly review the rationale for Nader’s candidacy. We start with his assertion that the American political system was deeply corrupt, and that only an individual of exceptional purity and integrity could make the needed changes. And this individual therefore forged thousands of petition signatures on his path to glory. Sounds like the end of the line for Nader’s movement, doesn’t it? And his vote total did decline by 84% from 2000 to 2004.
And yet Nader remains inexplicably influential. Sanders’ campaign in 2016 lacked any real critique of capitalism, other than the catchphrase “casino capitalism,” just as Nader used “corporate welfare” instead of actually making sense on the subject.
Sanders’ campaign was likewise built on Nader’s template of self-righteousness and extreme opposition to the center. The talk of a “rigged” election, of betrayal and fraud by the DNC, only laid the groundwork for later catastrophes, including January 6.
The threat to tip the election to Trump was front and center, frequently repeated by Sanders’ supporters and surrogates. Given what happened in 2000, there was real teeth in that threat. And there’s data to suggest that that might indeed have happened:
In the end, of course, Sanders did support Clinton, perhaps a bit half-heartedly, but he was much more reasonable than Nader would have been in his place.
But the 2016 primary election didn’t have to play out as it did. There was another path, one laid out by Howard Dean in 2004. In Dean’s campaign, opposition to Republican policies was much more pronounced; Sanders hardly talked about the Republicans at all. And there was never any question that Dean would support the eventual nominee, and Dean’s supporters never threatened to sit out the election or support Bush—or Nader.
In the end, Dean had established enough credibility to become DNC chairman, where he led the Democrats to a striking victory in the 2006 Congressional elections. Without that election, and without Dean, Obamacare would never have passed in 2009.
There is a natural symbiotic relationship between the Left and the Center that Nader and his followers always ignored. Early in Sanders’ 2016 campaign he mostly talked about the issues, and Hillary Clinton was forced to follow suit. Sanders made Clinton a better candidate, and the Democratic Party a better party.
But when Sanders’ campaign lost its vision, so did the Democratic Party. Clinton debated well against Trump, but she had no way to counter Trump’s connection with the sour mood of the country; she fell back on “America is already great!” which definitely missed the moment. She needed the combative but idealistic Sanders—we all did—and she didn’t have him. She needed a sharply defined program of reform, and Sanders’ credibility behind it.
And if Sanders had been the SDP or Howard Dean, she might have had that.
Let’s pivot to what we can do. What would an effective left-wing movement look like in 21st century America? Here are some points:
We must always focus on the good of the people. Nader was willing to sacrifice the people in 2000 to teach the Democrats a lesson, to give them “a cold shower.” And some of Sanders’ supporters took the same attitude in 2016. This is simply unacceptable; this is how fascists or Stalinists think.
Liberals and centrists must always be regarded as potential allies and recruits. And we should cautiously extend that to conservatives as well. We need to deal with our opponents with firmness and fairness. The world and time are vast, and enemies may yet turn to friends.
Moral superiority is irrelevant, in fact it is often just a con. The only relevant moral political choice is whether we are willing to sacrifice to build a better world. Once that choice is made, reasonable people may well differ on the means to that end.
As a substitute for content-free moral superiority, we should be perfectly clear about basic values: human life is sacred; human life comes from nature, therefore nature too is sacred; “man does not live by bread alone,” that is, the life of the spirit is profoundly important; the values of the Enlightenment are the basis of our civilization.
And with capitalism, we need to make the case that capitalist socialization, while valuable economically, is profoundly destructive where there are no checks and balances to its power.
We stand for free and fair elections, and an end to disinformation and intimidation in our political life.
We need to be clear that we aren’t running for student council, as so many liberals seem to be. We are here to change the world, come what may.
Billionaire Capitalism is inimical to democracy, so scenes like the storming of the Capitol—and worse—will continue until Billionaire Capitalism is defeated as a political movement.
This isn’t about Trump. Mitch McConnell says he is devoted to the Constitution and free elections, but he’s either dissembling or suffering from cognitive dissonance; it wasn’t that long ago that he threatened to dismiss impeachment charges against Trump without debate or calling witnesses, on a simple voice vote! This was clearly contrary to the “original intent” of the Founders.
Furthermore, McConnell never opposed Trump’s false claims of electoral fraud or his efforts to undermine democracy until he himself was put in the position of voting for an absurdity: to reject certified election results from the states, results that had been exhaustively litigated in the courts. McConnell’s policy is to relentlessly undermine democracy while appearing to be a Constitutional purist—much like Alito or Thomas. The semblance and outward forms of democracy must remain, but Billionaire Capitalism must win nearly every election.
Remember, it’s been clear for four long years that Trump would never accept election results that went against him, and yet when Trump was impeached for abuse of power, McConnell was outraged. If Moscow Mitch had really cared about the integrity of the 2020 election, he would have gotten rid of Trump when he had the chance, and voted to convict him.
But maybe McConnell suffers from cognitive dissonance; maybe he thinks that billionaires can continually grow richer and more powerful while the Constitution still guides our politics. But as Woodrow Wilson said, “if there are men big enough to own the US government, they will own it.”
You might think that the storming of the Capitol was too stupid to flow out of an otherwise successful political movement like Billionaire Capitalism. Surely they must be smarter than that? But it was no more stupid than the Beer Hall Putsch, and the Nazis went on to destroy much of the world despite that fiasco.
More to the point, the limitations of Billionaire Capitalism are the limitations of billionaire socialization. Billionaires are not socialized to deal with any sort of resistance from others, and since they have no political principles (other than increasing their own wealth and power) they are profoundly clueless when dealing with people who do.
Having surrounded themselves with sycophants, people with healthy self-esteem seem like monsters to them.
In many areas of life, billionaires are profoundly clueless. When Trump disinvited the Golden State Warriors from the White House and singled out Stephen Curry as the cause, of course other NBA players pushed back on Twitter. Most memorably, LeBron James addressed Trump as “U bum.”
But what did Trump expect? Quite simply, he expected no resistance, because when billionaires humiliate people their victims almost never strike back. Likewise, when Trump incited the mob to storm the Capitol, he assumed—without thinking too deeply about it—that Congress would be too frightened or disorganized to complete the vote, that the storming of the Capitol would be as decisive as the storming of the Winter Palace, or the Bastille.
But of course the Winter Palace and the Bastille represented thoroughly discredited regimes, while American democracy retains credibility, to the extent that even those who attack it claim to be defending it.
Only when we think carefully about billionaire socialization do we see how catastrophic Billionaire Capitalism is and will be for civilization and the well-being of our people. The ultra-rich rarely deal directly with difficult truths, and so their reality principle is in shreds; if they want something, ordinarily it just happens. This socialization cannot prepare people to govern.
If Billionaire Capitalism triumphs, we will lurch from disaster to disaster, with a collapsing climate and plunging life expectancy. This will be due to their absolute incompetence as much as their profound indifference to human life.
An immediate example being Trump’s response to COVID-19. How many more such botched emergencies before America finally collapses?
If there’s one thing this election proved, it’s that Billionaire Capitalism and the Republican Party are determined to eliminate free and fair elections.
There was systemic voter suppression across the board. For example, although Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to restore voting rights to felons in 2018, the legislature effectively prevented many ex-offenders from voting by requiring in 2019 they pay all court-related fees, affecting possibly 775,000 voters, which is over twice the 370,000 vote margin of Trump’s victory in Florida.
But in addition to merely suppressing the vote, the Republican state government apparently played an even more insidious game, by not providing local election officials the names of ineligible felons so they could be purged from the voter rolls—-until after voting had already begun.
This was a sophisticated multi-tiered voter suppression strategy. By requiring felons to pay all their court-related fees, Florida Republicans imposed a twenty-first century poll tax, and then they failed to enforce that requirement until some people had already voted. Most felons, hearing of the requirement, probably either paid their fees or gave up on voting—but some may have registered to vote after the referendum in 2018 and before the Legislature effectively barred them in 2019 from voting.
By by failing to purge felons from the rolls until voting began in 2020, the state of Florida created a “poison pill” which could have been the basis for a legal challenge in case Biden carried the state.
This could have resulted in a do-over election. You might argue that this was all coincidental, but the delay in purging ex-offenders who hadn’t paid court fees until voting began is telling.
Another example of voter suppression is the coordinated efforts of the USPS to slow down the mail while the Pennsylvania legislature set a deadline for the arrival of mailed ballots that would have resulted in perhaps tens of thousands of ballots being disqualified. When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended the deadline for receiving ballots three days to compensate for the slowdown in USPS deliveries, its decision was roundly condemned by Justice Alito, who acted as if deliberately slowing down the mail to rig an election was exactly what Madison and Washington had in mind. (See Legitimacy, Federalism and the Election).
I was personally affected by the USPS slowdown. I live in a state where voting by mail is the norm; everyone gets a mailed ballot. if you want to fill out your ballot at the county courthouse on Election Day, there’s a room set aside for that. But most people receive and return their ballot by mail.
This year, my ballot was mailed on October 9, from a county courthouse 18 miles from my home. (I was able to track it online.) On October 23, I still hadn’t received it; I requested a new ballot and picked it up at the county courthouse the same day. I filled it out and dropped my ballot off at a county office on October 24, a Saturday. Online, I tracked its progress; it was received on October 26 and accepted on the 28th.
On October 30 I received my original ballot. It had taken three weeks to travel eighteen miles. I ripped it up and threw it away. This is why federal judges required postal inspectors across the country to sweep sorting facilities for “lost” ballots. There is no knowing how effective Louis DeJoy’s efforts at voter suppression were. In an election with record-breaking turnout, a million or two lost ballots might not be noticed. Did this provide Trump with the margin of victory in North Carolina, for example?
Could ballots lost by the USPS account for part of the polling error we saw in the election?
But let’s pivot and look beyond direct voter suppression. On November 11 there was an extraordinary event in Georgia:
Republican Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia called on the state’s GOP secretary of state to resign on Monday, citing “failures” in the election process but not providing any specific evidence to support their claims.
“There have been too many failures in Georgia elections this year and the most recent election has shined a national light on the problems,” Loeffler and Perdue said in a joint statement. “The Secretary of State has failed to deliver honest and transparent elections. He has failed the people of Georgia, and he should step down immediately.”
The Georgia Republicans will both face runoff elections on Jan. 5. Loeffler, who beat back an intra-party challenge from Rep. Doug Collins, will go up against Rev. Raphael Warnock, while Perdue will go up against Jon Ossoff.
The key accusation the senators make against Raffensperger is that he “failed to deliver honest…elections,” which is extremely harsh—there’s nothing worse you could say about a Secretary of State. In his defense, however, he oversaw an election delivered Georgia to Joe Biden, even though he personally favored Trump; this is not the act of a dishonest man.
But when Perdue and Loeffler use the word “dishonest” they mean that Raffensperger failed to suppress the Democratic vote enough to allow them to avoid the inconvenience of a runoff.
What do they expect to accomplish by demanding that Raffensperger resign? Of course, they might have thought he would actually resign and be replaced by a Republican who do a more “honest” job of suppressing the Democratic vote by reducing the number of voting machines, disqualifying as many ballots as possible from Democratic-leaning precincts, deleting registered Democrats from the voting rolls—the usual bag of tricks.
Or they may have thought they could intimidate him into being more “honest” in the runoff elections.
Either way, their demands feed into the Trump Victimization Narrative that the election was stolen from Trump and the Republican Party. In terms of court challenges, this narrative is doing poorly, because there is no evidence of “illegal” votes being cast—or at least any more often than two-headed calves are born. And demonizing the Democrats isn’t working that well, because the Democrats always push back with good legal arguments and investigative journalism. And online misinformation campaigns are triggering significant pushback from social media companies, especially Twitter; it seems Putin ruined it for everyone.
But scapegoating a lower-ranking Republican official for their own lack of appeal at the ballot box? That might work since it doesn’t involve a judge asking for evidence or fighting Democrats.
But no. Raffensperger has shown some fight himself:
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger responded in a statement Monday saying he would not resign, and defended his office’s handling of the election. He said the election was a “resounding success” from an administration perspective. He highlighted his office’s briefings and updates to argue that they had conducted the process with transparency.
“I know emotions are running high. Politics are involved in everything right now,” Raffensperger said. “If I was Senator Perdue, I’d be irritated I was in a runoff. And both Senators and I are all unhappy with the potential outcome for our President. But I am the duly elected Secretary of State. One of my duties involves helping to run elections for all Georgia voters. I have taken that oath, and I will execute that duty and follow Georgia law.”
Raffensperger said the process for reporting results in the state was orderly and followed the law. And he added that while he was “sure” there were illegal votes cast, it was “unlikely” that their total rose to the “numbers or margin necessary to change the outcome” of the election.
He also took a shot at Perdue and Loeffler for their criticism: “As a Republican, I am concerned about Republicans keeping the U.S. Senate. I recommend that Senators Loeffler and Perdue start focusing on that.”
Looking beyond Georgia, the extraordinary efforts made to intimidate, bribe, or unduly influence election officials and legislators in Michigan—especially in Wayne County—were without precedent.
But the effort to corrupt our elections goes beyond massive voter suppression and intimidation—even including the failed attempt to intimidate the Secretary of State of Georgia. Some of the corruption is systemic.
For example, campaign finance reform was gutted in Citizens United by five Republican judges, including the same Chief Justice Roberts who often claims there are no partisan judges. This not only allowed billionaires to self-fund their own campaigns, it also opened the door for dark money, where the sources of campaign funding are entirely secret. We have no idea whether the Russian Mafia or the Chinese PLA or the Saudis are contributing to our elections—-and shaping the issues that dominate our national dialogue.
The destruction of the Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court falls into the same category, providing Southern racists the opportunity to intimidate rural black voters, a tactic that is part of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.
And of course there’s the Electoral College, which should have been amended out of the Constitution long ago. But the rise of Billionaire Capitalism means is that it’s virtually impossible to amend the Constitution anymore.
But the biggest single factor in the corruption of American elections is disinformation; if people are intensely propagandized into believing falsehoods, their votes cannot be considered free. If you tell people a thousand times that cyanide is food and salad is poison, and then ask them to order lunch, a significant number of them will end up dead on the restaurant floor, human suggestibility being what it is.
What falsehoods are we talking about? The falsehood that climate change is a hoax, that Biden is suffering from dementia, that the pandemic will disappear “by magic,” that Obama is a Moslem who was born in Kenya, that Obamacare has harmed public health, that Republicans care about white working people, that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 elections, and that cutting taxes for billionaires helps everyone.
This is not an exhaustive list. If we want to go classic, we should note the myths that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that he had nuclear or biological weapons, that the stock market declined during Obama’s presidency, and that Hilary Clinton should be in prison for an IT mistake.
Of course when looking at Trump’s presidency the disinformation is on a different scale. It’s a falsehood that Biden has profited from his son’s business dealings; it’s a falsehood that American cities are in a state of anarchy. It’s an extreme falsehood that the vote counting was rigged in favor of the Democrats, or that significant numbers of illegal ballots were cast in either 2016 or 2020.
Lying to ordinary Republicans that the election was stolen—potentially getting people to commit acts of terrorism—-is inconceivably destructive.
But the biggest of all these falsehoods is the overall narrative that capitalism is itself a victim. Of what, you might ask? Of the need of our people for healthcare, jobs and education, for clean air and water and a stable climate, for fair elections and a tax system that doesn’t create an oligarchy? Yes, all that.
But capitalism is most particularly victimized by our desire not to be killed by capitalism, to merely survive it—for example by covid-19.
I am writing on December 13, 2020 at 6 am; I just poured a cup of coffee. In twenty minutes the coffee will be too cold for my taste, and by that time about 33 more Americans will have died from covid-19, and most of those deaths will have been avoidable. As my coffee grows cold, the heat drains from the bodies of those 33 Americans, who gasp out their last breath under the exhausted gaze of nurses and doctors.
The falsehood that the suffering capitalism causes is not real.
I could go on, but this is where Billionaire Capitalism has led us. The people would never support the concentration and wealth and power if they understood all the implications, so disinformation on a massive scale has always been a necessity for Billionaire Capitalism.
But when I say “disinformation” that’s an extreme understatement. What the right-wing media has created can only be compared to what Goebbels did by endlessly repeating the Big Lie that a Jewish conspiracy controlled Great Britain, the United States and the USSR, and that this conspiracy was using those countries in an effort to destroy Germany, and so destroying the Jewish population of occupied Europe was a legitimate act of self-defense.
In other words, Goebbels created an entire world-view and sold it to the German people through endless repetition; Fox News has done something quite similar.
If the comparison to Goebbels seems extreme, let’s take a deep breath and consider—-who undermines free elections and de-legitimizes them at every turn? People who want to end free elections, that’s who. They aren’t doing this out of some mysterious ethical lapse—they’re doing it because that’s the future they want.
In other words, we’re facing a totalitarian movement. As usual with Billionaire Capitalism, what you see is what you get—Republican silence or cooperation with Trump’s efforts to overturn a free election isn’t some melodramatic moral failure of individuals. It is instead perfectly logical, given their political goal of concentrating wealth and power into as few hands as possible; democracy was always an obstacle to achieving that goal. The ideology of Billionaire Capitalism is inherently hostile to democracy and free elections.
This point is “separable,” so to speak, from everything else I’ve written about socialism and capitalism—-that is, even if I’m all wet on everything else, I’m not wrong on this: the Republican Party is committed to destroying free elections in this country. Trump is not an anomaly, and the silence of most other Republicans on this issue isn’t cowardice—it’s agreement.
It’s one thing for Republicans to gerrymander, suppress voter turnout, pack the courts and blanket the nation with disinformation, both Russian and homegrown. But it’s been an open question whether, given their other advantages, they would actually attempt to overturn an election where the vote went decisively against them. They do have to maintain a fig-leaf of legitimacy, and some of them might shrink from such a loathsome deed.
But now we have the answer. The majority of Republican elected officials are willing to throw out any set of votes—whether from Detroit or Atlanta—that go against them, however ridiculous the pretext. If they lose an election by seven million votes, they will try to disenfranchise seven million and one voters. And they will incite violence against anyone who stands in their way, particularly other Republicans.
And at this point, violence is a key issue. Will we end up with a widespread domestic terror movement based on the myth that the election was stolen from Trump? This appears more likely than not, because the goal of billionaire capitalism is to destroy free elections covertly, without obviously doing so. And what could be better that to destroy free elections in the name of preserving them? This would be the apotheosis of billionaire capitalism’s campaign of disinformation, the point where the sun really does rise in the west and set in the east, because billionaires say so.
But an armed uprising—bombings, assassinations, mass shootings—would require several hundred or several thousand participants to be sustainable. A dozen or so domestic terrorists would be hunted down in a matter of days. But will ordinary Republicans be willing to “go McVey” in such numbers? Oh, they love to go online and make anonymous threats, but actual fighting and killing? I doubt many of them will go that far—but the ones that do might cause a lot of damage.
I am assuming of course that the military and police will not attempt to overthrow the Biden administration, which is a safe assumption; no general will risk his career, and no police chief will risk prison.
And if there is a persistent domestic terrorist movement that kills hundreds or thousands of Americans and disrupts American life for a few years, then what? There is a tendency in American politics to recoil from extremism, and that might be decisive.
But Billionaire Capitalism will continue trying to destabilize and discredit democracy. There’s an Iranian folk tale about a turtle and a scorpion trapped in a flood. They find themselves on an island about to disappear in rising waters. The scorpion begs the turtle to save his life, to carry him on his back to safety. The turtle is highly dubious: “you’ll sting me.” But the scorpion pleads desperately, saying “why would I hurt someone who is saving my life?” Finally the turtle agrees—aren’t we all living creatures, after all? They set off, and the scorpion tries repeatedly to sting the turtle in the head, but the turtle always manages to duck away.
They reach safety, and the turtle, outraged, demands an explanation.
And the scorpion says, “it’s just in my nature.”
And it’s the same with Billionaire Capitalism—-it can’t really co-exist with democracy for long, because sooner or later the people will vote to end a system that is clearly harmful to them.
Eventually, the turtle will leave the scorpion behind.
I am writing on October 30, 2020. The US presidential election is imminent. The polls, which indicate Trump’s deep unpopularity, hang over Billionaire Capitalism like the writing on Belshazzar’s wall.
If Biden’s support on election day is anything like his support in the polls, he should win easily. He can only lose if:
The polls are dramatically wrong, or
Massive force is used to prevent or disrupt the voting or the vote count, or
The election results are reversed by the Supreme Court, perhaps piecemeal, by imposing voter-suppression rules that prevent the states from counting all the votes—or wholesale, by throwing out the results of blue states by whatever contorted reasoning.
The polls might be wrong, but they are as likely to be wrong in Biden’s favor as in Trump’s. The margins we are seeing in the best polls indicate a margin of victory of around 10%. The Democrats won the 2018 election by a margin of 8.6%, and that was before covid-19. So 10% is believable, and in fact the USC Dornsife poll shows a margin of 11.4% for Biden. The sample size of that poll is over five thousand voters.
Force will probably be used to disrupt the election or the vote count, but it is highly unlikely to change the final result. Democrats are resolute, and it seems the majority of them have already voted. The Proud Boys have only a few hundred members, and attacking voters and election clerks won’t be a good look for them.
That leaves us with the Supreme Court. Could the Court give the election to Trump, on whatever pretexts? Their legitimacy hangs in the balance, and if they’re smart, they won’t reverse the election, but they may not be smart. Supreme Court justices can make terrible mistakes; the justices who signed the Dred Scott decision believed they were ending the controversy over slavery, once and for all. They never dreamed their decision would trigger civil war.
John Roberts certainly understands the question of legitimacy. He consistently makes the case that the judiciary isn’t partisan, and whether you believe him or not—I don’t—he at least thinks that partisan judges are a bad thing, a point I appreciate.
Roberts notwithstanding, concern about the Supreme Court fixing the election isn’t mere paranoia. Here’s part of Alito’s opinion on the last Pennsylvania decision:
“It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before the election,” he wrote. “That question has national importance, and there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the federal Constitution.”
“The provisions of the federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless,” he wrote, “if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”
You see where Alito is going with this? He’s saying that because the U.S. Constitution specifies that state legislatures are responsible for arranging elections—and it doesn’t mention state courts—that the PA Supreme Court cannot hear a complaint that the legislature’s rules violate the Pennsylvania Constitution, which is exactly what happened. Because the PA Supreme Court didn’t just jump in and pre-emptively interfere with the legislature—there was a lawsuit. There is a clause in the state constitution that guarantees that votes will be counted, and the state Supreme Court found that the Republican legislature had violated that clause.
Alito is not saying that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court misinterpreted the state constitution or that its decision was incorrect in some other way. He’s saying that the State Supreme Court had no business at all hearing the case.
How wrong-headed is this? Let us count the ways. First of all, there are state and local elections on these same ballots. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court doesn’t have the power to review election rules for state and local elections, because the US Constitution doesn’t explicitly give it that power? How absurd is that?
Second, Alito is saying that no one can review the actions of the state legislature with regard to elections, because Alito’s argument also applies to the Pennsylvania State Attorney General, the Secretary of State and even law enforcement, if fraud or bribery is suspected.
In other words, when it comes to elections, there are no checks and balances within Pennsylvania. But every other power the state of Pennsylvania has is conditioned on fair elections and the legitimacy they confer.
Lastly, Alito is implying that federalism is dead. If the state of Pennsylvania cannot uphold its own constitution through its own courts, then it’s just a hollow shell; if it cannot guarantee fair elections using its own methods, then it is likewise kaput as a political institution.
What about originalism? If the Founders intended anything, they meant to establish a strong federal system, but Alito just tossed all that into the “dustbin of history.”
This is what is comes down to: for all the pious lectures we’ve heard for so long about the Founders’ intent and the sacred status of federalism in the Constitution, keeping Billionaire Capitalism in power overrides all that. Because if Trump is President for another four years, the billionaires won’t face a tax increase. That’s always the highest priority: concentration of wealth and power.
And Alito doesn’t even hesitate to throw federalism overboard to protect the billionaires. Nor is he alone.
In the end, I believe the people will prevail in this election. But the conservatives on the Supreme Court will do all they can to undermine the integrity of this election, even if they destroy federalism and the legitimacy of the Court itself.
During the Cold War, the argument was made that members of the Communist Party should not be allowed free speech because, if they gained power through persuasion, they would suppress the free speech of the rest of us.
This argument did touch on something important: free speech can only work if all parties share many of the same values.
In the end, the communists were suppressed. Although they weren’t often thrown in jail merely for their speech, almost everything else was done to prevent them from getting a fair hearing. (see “Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America,” by Ellen Schrecker, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 0-316-77470-7 for examples.)
However, despite the experience of the CP, we had free and effective speech within certain constraints; Democrats and Republicans did share many values and goals in the ‘50s and ‘60s. From 1945 we were able to debate important issues such as civil rights, the nuclear test ban treaty, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, nuclear deterrence, foreign aid, the space program, etc. Granted, extreme (and possibly useful) positions were not given a wide audience, but free speech did allow the country to debate the issues and converge on solutions.
Because free speech is a system, not merely a benefit for individuals. Free speech is a method of making social and political decisions; we examine issues and debate alternatives until we settle on a solution. The Enlightenment vision was that Reason would guide our debates and lead us to more good decisions than bad. As I pointed out in Free Speech and Kevin Williamson, this system will lead to some individuals being ignored, which in modern times is sometimes described as a violation of free speech. But freedom of speech implies a freedom to listen—or not listen.
Of course the suppression of the CP set a precedent, which the FBI and local police later used against both the Civil Rights and the anti-war movements. The methods used against the CP were expanded to include the use of force against large numbers of peaceful demonstrators, including the Chicago police riot, the attack at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and the Kent State and Jackson State killings. The power structure used law enforcement (including the FBI) to cancel freedom of speech and assembly by illegal means—even deadly force.
Naturally, there was a backlash, which led many people to an absolutist position on the First Amendment. The argument was this: if the suppression of the CP had led to a prolonged attack on the free speech rights of less extreme political movements, then the suppression of the CP should never have happened. I don’t believe this issue is quite that simple—the response to the Civil Rights movement in particular would have been the same even if Stalin had never been born—but I do agree it was a bad precedent.
So, why this trip down memory lane? Because of Tom Cotton, whose op-ed in the New York Times called for using the Army against the protests that followed George Floyd’s death:
Wikipedia comments:
Following the death of George Floyd, Cotton rejected the view that there is “systemic racism in the criminal justice system in America.”[66] Amid the following protests, Cotton advocated on Twitter that the military be used to support police, and to give “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”[67] In the military, the term “no quarter” refers to the killing of lawfully surrendering combatants, which is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Cotton subsequently said that he was using the “colloquial” version of the phrase and cited examples of Democrats and the mainstream media also using the phrase.[68][69]
A few days later, an opinion piece by Cotton entitled “Send In the Troops” was published by The New York Times arguing for the deployment of federal troops to counter looting and rioting in major American cities. Dozens of New York Times staff members sharply criticized the decision to the publish Cotton’s article, describing its rhetoric as dangerous.[70][71] Following the negative response from staffers, The New York Times responded by saying the piece went through a “rushed editorial process” that will now be examined.[72] Editorial page editor James Bennet resigned days later.[73]
The Times’ editorial process may have been “rushed,” but if Cotton had called for “no quarter” in his op-ed, I bet it would have slowed down dramatically; James Bennet isn’t quite that inattentive. So Cotton tweeted “no quarter” before the op-ed appeared, but it was obviously part of his overall message. His contention that he was using “no quarter” colloquially is of course a miserable lie. There may be a “colloquial” use of that phrase, but in a military context it has only one fatal meaning.
Another piece of context missing is the source of the violence. In many instances, the police themselves were responsible for initiating violence, particularly by using pepper spray and tear gas against peaceful demonstrators, although people were also blinded by pepper balls, knocked to the ground, and beaten. The case of Martin Gugino is well-known, but there’s also the ruling made by a federal judge in Denver after nine days of protests:
A federal judge issued an extraordinary ruling late Friday [June 5, 2020] ordering police not to use chemical weapons — such as tear gas and pepper spray — and less-lethal projectiles against peaceful protesters in Denver.
“The Denver Police Department has failed in its duty to police its own,” Judge R. Brooke Jackson wrote in his sweeping ruling.
The order comes on the ninth straight day of demonstrations in the city in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minnesota police officers last week.
“The Court has reviewed video evidence of numerous incidents in which officers used pepper-spray on individual demonstrators who appeared to be standing peacefully, some of whom were speaking to or yelling at the officers, none of whom appeared to be engaging in violence or destructive behavior,” Jackson wrote. The order is immediate but temporary.
The linked article includes an iconic picture that fairly represents the entire problem. It’s also noted that there have been hundreds of complaints, including from several City Council members. Once the judge issued this order, observers noticed a substantial reduction in tension on the streets.
And Denver is just one city, and probably not the worst. Some police departments have been professional, but many have not. The footage out of New York is unimpressive. Of course, these are demonstrations against the police, and unfortunately too many officers have taken it personally.
This is not to say that some criminals don’t take advantage of the protests—some left-wing, some right-wing and many no doubt apolitical. But if peaceful protestors are tear-gassed and beaten, then the resulting chaos will allow criminals free rein—the police probably won’t even see them.
Cotton gives examples of police who have lost their lives during the protests. Conspicuously, he doesn’t mention the pre-meditated assassination of an Oakland Federal Protective Service security guard—-by right-wing Boogaloo boys, who later killed a sheriff’s deputy near Santa Cruz.
So, in this context, let’s review what Tom Cotton is proposing. With George Floyd’s death, massive civil rights protests erupted across the country, with “between 15 million and 26 million people had participated at some point in the demonstrations in the United States, making the protests the largest in United States history,” according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests.
The protests were largely peaceful except for the actions of a few, including some right-wing Trump supporters. But in many places, the police attempted to suppress the peaceful protests using weapons like tear gas, pepper balls, Billy clubs and pepper spray.
So Cotton proposes that troops be deployed and “no quarter” given to “insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.” Let’s not forget that Cotton is both a former Army officer and a graduate of Harvard Law School. He understands what “no quarter” and “due process” mean. A protestor shot dead cannot defend himself from the charge of rioting or looting, which in any case are not capital offenses. Cotton’s “no quarter” and “overwhelming…force” rhetoric means mass indiscriminate shootings. If a single dead protestor can’t defend his actions in court, how about a thousand? There’s no way these deaths could be properly investigated, even if the police took an interest.
Nowhere does Cotton mention using the Army to arrest or detain window-breakers or looters. Because that is not what he’s after—he wants dead bodies. He wants to crush a legal and almost entirely peaceful political movement with force.
Cotton is proposing to turn American streets into Tiananmen Square.
In one fell swoop, Cotton will have eliminated freedom of speech, freedom to assemble and protest, and due process. He will have politicized the U.S. Army and destroyed its reputation and morale. How many hundreds or thousands of body bags will be needed?
Families and communities will be torn apart, our nation divided for generations.
Should the New York Times have published this op-ed? What possible good could come from debating Cotton’s dream of an Assad-style massacre?
The New York Times, in its disclaimer, timidly complained that “the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh.” Really, the tone was needlessly harsh? But the content was okay? If the Senator had only used milder phrasing in his proposal to destroy a peaceful political movement with gunfire, the New York Times would have been happier?
Of course the op-ed should never have been published. Reasoned debate with people who want to destroy freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and due process is pointless. People who believe it’s glorious to murder peaceful protestors and tear our country apart do not share our values or goals, and we cannot find common ground with them.
If millions of Americans started to seriously believe that aliens live among us, would they get an op-ed in the New York Times? That might be newsworthy, but would it be debatable? What about the incel movement, or Holocaust deniers? Anti-vaxxers? No, because it’s widely understand—though seldom stated—that some positions are not truly debatable. Every newspaper and website, every church and university has standards on what is debatable and what isn’t, unstated though they may often be.
But these standards are not random; there are patterns. And one broad pattern is that speech that justifies violence is not allowed. Could you justify a school shooting by saying that the students are snobs, and the teachers are uncaring? No, that’s impossible; even Facebook would take down that message.
What Tom Cotton is doing is applying the ethos of a school shooter to political debate. He won’t do the shooting himself, of course—it’s beneath his senatorial dignity. He wants the Army to do the job for him—and the New York Times to give him permission. And the New York Times obliged him by inexplicably published his op-ed.
Freedom of speech implies the freedom to not listen, the freedom to vehemently reject arguments that undermine our basic values, most particularly when they could lead to a massacre within a matter of days. People are entitled to their opinions, but they’re not entitled to an audience, and they are not entitled to incite or justify violence.
But free speech still exists in some quarters. Reporters at the New York Times apparently pointed out that Cotton was talking about shooting them, and he certainly was—among many others. Amazingly, this seems not to have occurred to James Bennet. And that particular discussion may have fed into a debate about Bennet’s role at the newspaper, which led to his resignation. Simultaneously, the Army itself (after a discreet behind-the-scenes debate) was making it clear that it wanted no part of Cotton’s and Trump’s planned slaughter.
In both cases the debates led to a clear decision. Bennet is out, and the generals will not shoot American protestors.
Perhaps Bennet felt that “there are two sides to any argument,” and in some rough sense that’s true. After all, Trump, Cotton and Billionaire Capitalism want to cancel democracy and rule by force or fraud, and the majority of the population is opposed to that. But the New York Times and James Bennet cannot act as honest brokers in this argument, because this isn’t an honest difference of opinion. This is a brutal power struggle and if it turns out badly the New York Times will itself be a smoking ruin.
The only honest position is to oppose Billionaire Capitalism, root and branch.
The young women in these stories take identity politics with total seriousness, and of course that’s an obstacle to working effectively with people who aren’t just like you—and with building a mass movement. For the most part, identity politics doesn’t work politically; it’s great if you want to find twenty or thirty people who share your identity and go to meetings with them forever. But beyond that?
You might say, what about Black Lives Matter? They’ve had success. But I don’t see BLM as an identity movement. They are actually an old school civil rights organization, with excellent branding and communication skills. And by “communication skills” I mean they are great at talking to the media and white people. They have laser-like focus on a few specific forms of black oppression, particularly police violence, and with a particular emphasis on using images—videos—to communicate. The photographs of bleeding Freedom Riders and of the firehoses on Edmund Pettus Bridge have been replaced by the videos of George Floyd and so many others; Dr. King and Rev. Abernathy would easily recognize BLM’s methods.
Nationalist movements—which include modern identity movements—mostly communicate to the in-group. BLM is winning because it communicates with society as a whole.
Identity groups often find communication outside the group unsettling, even shocking. And in the linked articles, the young women of color are of course shocked when white feminists push back and insist on their own identity. But that’s inevitable because identities are identities. White people have identities too, and they are free to insist on them. Your ethnic studies professors may have convinced you that white identities are racist or illegitimate—but they didn’t convince white people of that. You may believe your identity is more important than the next person’s but everyone else feels the same way, regardless of how privileged they may be. For example:
Monica Weeks knew she was taking a risk when she ran for vice president of the National Organization for Women. She was young—29 years old—and campaigning on the first all-women-of-color ticket in the organization’s 50-year history. Her friends thought the group was old-fashioned, and her mother, an immigrant from Cuba, was anxious about her taking on such a high-profile role. But recent family events, coupled with the devastating results of the 2016 election, had convinced her that now was the time to step up.
That’s how Weeks found herself in front of a sea of older white women at the Colors Lounge in Melbourne, Florida, in June 2017, addressing the Brevard County NOW chapter. Her voice broke as she spoke about what motivated her to run, and the conversations she’d had with her mother about the importance of fighting for both women and people of color.
“It’s important because we need to give a voice to those most oppressed in order to make everybody better,” Weeks told the audience, many of whom were around her mother’s age. “That’s women of color, that’s disabled people, that’s LGBTQ people.”
She was about to move on to the most relevant part of her stump speech—how NOW could help do all this—when she was interrupted by a white woman in the audience.
“White women, too!” the woman yelled.
“And then yeah, don’t forget the white women,” Weeks replied evenly.
“Just the women with the pussies!” another woman called out, in what seemed to be a reference to trans women. In video obtained by The Daily Beast, you can hear an audience member groan.
“It’s OK,” Weeks said, attempting to press on. “It is important to include all women.”
“All women!” the first heckler cried.
“It is important to include all women,” Weeks tried. “But if you don’t realize the privilege that’s been afforded to you because of a difference in color…”
“We recognize it!” the first woman yelled.
Eventually, Weeks was able to get the crowd back under control. But she says the experience made her realize, for the first time, that there were systemic issues in NOW that even she couldn’t fix.
“This organization has a problem of racism and ageism and [they] don’t know how to deal with it,” she told The Daily Beast in an interview.
“I thought when I was coming into the feminist movement I was joining this big sisterhood,” she added, “and that was the biggest disappointment in my life.”
If I sympathized with Weeks less than I do, I would laugh. Of course white feminists think that being an upper-middle-class woman is the same as being a sharecropper! And of course Weeks didn’t see that coming! Her audience had probably had a drink or three each (the meeting was at a lounge instead of the Episcopal Church for a reason) and Weeks didn’t pick up on that either.
So—self-important drunks yelling “pussies” in a public place—we’ve all been there. And Monica Weeks was so well-meaning, so sincere. The parking lot was probably full of bumper stickers saying: “Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History.”
On the other hand, if this is Monica’s “biggest disappointment” in life then her parents did a great job of keeping her away from about 40% of the human race.
Lesson number one: everyone thinks they’re just as special as you think you are, and that’s just life—and identity politics. You may think your problems are part of the profound suffering of your people, and that your group’s oppression is unique—and it may well be. But other people have their own problems, and if you want them to listen, you have to find common ground. That’s not just white feminists, that’s everyone.
Lesson number two: read the room. They were drunk, Monica, drunk! At least some of them were. And you didn’t tip your hat to them—you just launched into your concerns without acknowledging the audience or its concerns.
Here’s the deal with audiences. You have to earn their respect and attention. Fortunately, it usually doesn’t take much.
Lesson number three: if you have to talk to drunks, keep it light. If they wanted a serious, heart-felt discussion, they wouldn’t have been stinking by the time you arrived.
Unfortunately, because Weeks is steeped in identity politics, and takes herself a bit too seriously, all she can see is racism and ageism. If people don’t react the way you expect, they are oppressing you—but even if that’s true, so what? You still have the problem of getting what you want, which is the post of vice-president of NOW. You’d probably make some money and some friends, and even if it’s a hellhole it’ll look good on your resume. And best of all, you might get some valuable work done.
I’m having fun with Monica Weeks’ experience at the Colors Lounge, but there’s a serious underlying issue in these articles, besides the obvious and severe limitation of seeing everything in terms of identity politics.
I once went to a talk by Robin Morgan, who presented a vision of a socialist feminism, in which there was a clear path to reconciliation with men. This was 1969 or 1970, in Austin. And yes, that was a long time ago in terms of a human life span, but kalpas ago in terms of feminist ideology. (And I’m aware that Morgan herself has followed a winding road since then.)
“Socialist feminism.” First, why did she use that adjective, and second, whatever happened to that concept?
She used the word “socialist” because she had actually thought about what feminism would mean within capitalism, and had rejected that possibility. What were her reasons? I don’t know, but she might have figured that capitalism would inevitably absorb or “co-opt” feminism and make it part of the capitalist system.
Let’s go back and re-read that last sentence again.
NOW and all feminist groups I know of decided to accept capitalism long ago, at least implicitly. And in fact NOW is basically an organization for middle-class or wealthy women who want to eliminate gender barriers (to their own success) and not touch the class system or anything else. Educated white women have somewhat lower status and earnings than educated white men, and they want to fix that. And that’s fair enough as far as it goes. But is that as far as we need to go?
Do we believe that there are NOW members who are racist? That sounds strange at first—they don’t seem like the type—but then think about the context. If you accept capitalism then you accept billionaire capitalism because that’s currently the only game in town. If you want to “break the glass ceiling” then that will only happen—if it does—if you completely adopt the values and habits of billionaire capitalism, in other words, if you are socialized to it. Otherwise, you’ll only get promoted by mistake.
You have to accept the on-going concentration of wealth, the divisive and paralyzing class structure I discussed earlier, unchecked climate change, murderous policing policies and a complicit criminal justice system—plus the denial of any system of values not based on money or power. You can’t have a religion or a philosophy, you can’t care about the Constitution or the ideals of the Enlightenment. It’s okay if you believe you have a religion, as long as you never ever act on any of its precepts—what Jesus said about the camel can never darken your inner monologue. And you have to support existing hierarchies wherever you find them. (Once in a while, for branding purposes, you may have to pretend to care about something other than your own career. This is still consistent with capitalist socialization.)
If you can accept all that and nevertheless believe that feminism can accomplish anything valuable inside capitalism, then okay—have at it. You might get promoted and break that glass ceiling. Maybe you can buy a castle in Spain or endow a chair in the Women’s Studies department where you went to college.
And that will help the rest of women how? (I won’t even mention the human race as a whole.)
So okay, there’s no sisterhood, at least not at NOW. And that “support existing hierarchies” requirement implies that you absolutely cannot care what happens to poor people, or homeless people, or people wrongly convicted of crimes.
Or women who can’t afford to have children, or who can’t get good daycare if they do. Or women who need a good union and a good husband and don’t have either.
And if you have an employee who is young and dark-skinned who tries to talk to you about the plight of women of color, systemic racism, privilege, marginalization, and all that? You might want to listen, but you are required to support existing hierarchies. You may not feel like a racist, but you will act like a racist.
This is what feminism within capitalism looks like. It’s not a matter of personalities; it’s an ideology. If you uncritically accept capitalism in its current form, you are also accepting a hierarchical class system. And that means you will talk down to poor or non-white employees because that seems like a completely normal thing to do.
Now, if the acceptance of capitalism had been reasoned out and explicit, then it could have been precisely defined. For example: “We accept the productive and innovative aspects of capitalism, but we reject billionaire capitalism as a political movement, its class structure and its de-humanizing policies.” And that would have been reasonable and honest.
But you don’t break any glass ceilings with that sort of talk; billionaire capitalism is an all-or-nothing proposition.
As for my second question, what happened to the concept of socialist feminism? The answer is simple: if NOW has been co-opted by billionaire capitalism, then that’s that. They aren’t going to discuss some alternate reality in which that didn’t happen.
In terms of policies, NOW is still largely focused on the ERA. Of course any interns they hire—of any ethnicity—are likely going to question why the ERA is more important than policing, the health issues of black women, gun policy, or any one of about fifty different issues. And that’s not just true of young people; I have trouble understanding that myself.
Now, if you believe that the only problem women face is job and housing discrimination due to gender, then I suppose that a focus on the ERA would make sense. But you can’t say that about most women in America. Would the ERA guarantee health care to all women? No, of course not. It would only guarantee that women wouldn’t be denied healthcare because of their gender, a rare or non-existent event.
There is nothing in the ERA that will prevent further concentration of wealth and power, that will improve education or allow young people to start families and get good daycare and so on. It might help women get equal pay for equal work—if it were enforced, and under any conceivable Republican administration that won’t be the case. And what that means is that you can amend the Constitution all you like, but billionaire capitalism won’t be bound by the Constitution if it doesn’t want to be.
How did NOW end up in this trap? The founders and members were and are mostly sincere and meant to do the right thing, as they understood it. You might say they are an elite movement and dismiss them, but that’s historically naïve. The Enlightenment itself started out as an elite movement, and groups like the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood have benefitted people far beyond their own membership.
The problem with NOW is that it was founded on a nationalist model; no universal or socialist message was ever articulated. Because of this nationalist model, they were forced to discuss problems that are unique to women. So they talk about the health problems of women, even though: (a) the health issues of men are closely correlated, e.g., heart disease, cancer, obesity; and (b) universal coverage with a focus on preventive care would help both genders.
This feminist approach implicitly concedes the argument in favor of overall reform. If you complain, for example, that male doctors tend to ignore female patients (and I don’t dispute the fact) without pointing out that the medical system itself isn’t working—as evidenced by our declining life expectancies—then you’ve effectively changed the subject from a tragedy to a detail. We’re no longer discussing a public health catastrophe; instead, we’re talking about rude doctors.
And this problem is inherent to identity politics, not just feminism. Social problems that affect everyone are divided up by their effects on identity groups, and in the process general solutions—meaning fundamental change—get ignored. By always reducing the scope of every discussion of social problems to their effects on a particular identity group, we inevitably end up consumed with trivialities. Instead of advocating for a convenient, inexpensive, carbon-neutral transportation system, we kvetch about “man-spreading.”
The Left is stuck on identity politics. Is there any form of oppression that isn’t primarily racism, sexism, transphobia, etc.? I think many Americans would say no—if it doesn’t hurt a specific group, it’s not oppression.
But what about the following issues?
Climate change. We are seeing devastating storms, floods, fires, and soon enough crop failures.
Loss of democracy. There is gerrymandering, voter suppression, foreign interference, and anarchic campaign financing.
Loss of science. Our best tool is being undermined by billionaire capitalism.
Declining life expectancy. This started with working-class whites, but now it’s affecting the entire population.
Declining birth (and marriage) rate. Economic pressure and health problems are keeping young people from starting families; Americans are a species going extinct.
Opioids
Benzodiazepines and suicide.
Trans-fatty acids
High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
Obesity. Doctors all over the country are handing out diets to patients. Let’s try outlawing HFCS and trans-fats and see what our obesity rate is then.
Unsafe processed foods
Micro-plastics in the food chain. These are potentially catastrophic endocrine disrupters.
Homelessness. It would take FDR or LBJ two or three years to make significant progress on this problem.
Pervasive dehumanization. All of our oppression involves a denial of the value of human life. This dehumanization is “pervasive” because it affects everyone.
Social Despair. Mental health issues, drug addiction, suicide, crime, belief in conspiracy theories and a denial of social obligations.
Mass shootings.
Hollowing out of Christianity. One of the worst crimes of billionaire capitalism is its corruption of organized Christianity. Almost every church is now a Church of Trump. Where are people supposed to go for Christ’s mercy and empathy?
Loss of antibiotic efficacy. We have fewer and fewer antibiotics that actually work. The drug companies aren’t investing in developing new ones.
Loss of public health discipline. The covid-19 pandemic has proven that the United States cannot deal with any sort of serious public health challenge—unless we have the permission of billionaires, which we don’t.
Loss of manufacturing. To take the tools from the hands of American workers was a terrible moment in our history.
Social Media and isolation. Social media has paradoxically resulted in more isolation, alienation, and hatred.
Loss of contact with nature.
I realize there’s a some overlap on these issues, but I wanted to drive home the point that NOW and that ilk—other identity movements—are doing blessed nothing about any these problems.
And the majority of these issues lead directly to death, to the despair of a human soul in its last moments. And we are talking about tens of millions, perhaps billions of deaths. Take this list of problems as a whole, and we face the end of our civilization.
Racism and sexism did not cause any of these issues; all these are down to billionaire capitalism.
If identity politics could stop billionaire capitalism, it would already have done so. Identity politics can often spotlight specific oppressions, but it can’t find root causes or even general patterns. It can’t see the forest for the trees.
The grocery list of racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia and whatever all else assumes that our society is basically fair and just—-except to certain groups. And that is simply false. Our system is profoundly destructive to the entire human race.
The Socialist Investor 